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(If you missed Part 1, click here to read it.)
Not only do you need to have spare parts ready and available, managers are responsible for overseeing the entire inventory and purchasing management processes. Who sets the min. / max. quantities, who creates purchases requests, who approves them, who sets up vendor relationships, who negotiates better pricing, who sends purchase requests to vendors, who receives purchased items, who puts them away, who checks out, returns, and counts parts, who notifies Maintenance that a part that they have been waiting for has been received, who analyses consumption, etc.? Spinning plates do not require inventory or purchasing management.
To keep plates spinning, all you do is spin them. With maintenance, equipment needs to be maintained on a regular basis (oil change every 3 months), failures need to be predicted, and equipment conditions need to be analyzed in order to prevent failures. As a result, multiple preventive maintenance (PMs), predictive maintenance (PdMs), and condition-based monitoring (CBMs) tasks and schedules need to be created, perfected, and managed for every piece of equipment. Plates require none of this. They just need to be packed safely away until the next show.
Not only do managers have to keep equipment running and customers happy, they have to report the cost of making this happen by account, cost center, department, expense class, equipment, location, repairable spare and / or system. With spinning plates, costs aren’t tracked.
In the world of maintenance, you never only work on one equipment or asset type. You work on many (boilers, chillers, compressors, conveyors, rooms, etc.). Additionally, within a type, there can be many different models. With spinning plates, you only have to deal with one type and model of plate.
And if all of the above isn’t enough, costs need to be minimized. With spinning plates, costs aren’t tracked.
Managers not only have limited time, they have many more variables to deal with other than the nine variables listed above and they need a tool to help them oversee, track, and manage these variables. That tool is EAM software. For those departments still not using an EAM, can you imagine what your company’s accounting department would look like if they ran it without accounting software? If you’re struggling to convince upper management that you need a EAM, for a starter, please share this article with them. For dollars and sense EAM justification with return on investment (ROI), complete the "Calculate Your EAM Return on Investment Now!" form at the bottom of this blog post. If you are ready to start looking at maintenance tracking software, buyer beware because all CMMS / EAM / FMMS software are not alike.
On a side note, I used to use the following scenario to help managers explain to their bosses why EAM software is needed…
Ask your boss how many cars does he or she own. Then, talk about maintaining those cars. Then, compare that number of cars to the number of assets and buildings that you need to maintain to paint the picture of why a maintenance tracking tool is needed. Let’s say that your boss has 3 cars and you have 1,000 assets to maintain. Yes, you can maybe keep track of maintaining 3 cars in your head, but how in the world can you easily keep track of 1,000 assets without software? If paper is used, how much time is wasted processing all of the paperwork. If Excel is used, how much time is spent creating reports? If nothing exists, how in the world can new hires be trained or improvements be made if nothing is tracked.
“What does not get measured does not get managed.”
This scenario starts to describe the magnitude of what needs to be maintained, but it doesn’t detail the intricacies of maintenance. This article begins to paint the picture and I hope it helps.
To maintenance and reliability success!
